![]() We just don’t allow that part to go further.” You never agree with Pablo’s actions, but they never seem like a jarring and abrupt moral volte-face, either. “It was important not seeing him as ‘bad’ or ‘good’, because we all have that shit in ourselves. Moura is at pains to avoid portraying Escobar as the shark-eyed bogeyman he could be in a lazier series. Despite his Brazilian accent causing mockery among some Colombians, Moura created a compellingly complex villain – one whose actions were made all the more shocking by their proximity to historical fact. I just tried to learn as much as I could,” says the actor. ![]() “I didn’t try to imitate Pablo or be like him. ![]() Gradually, he sculpted his own version of Escobar, as a cool, collected leader prone to bursts of terrifyingly pragmatic violence. He read everything about the drug lord he could find. Worried that he didn’t look like the pot-bellied Pablo, he piled on 40lbs (“You just eat delicious things. So Moura spent months away from his family in Medellín on a Spanish-language course. When playing Escobar in a show in which half the dialogue is Spanish, this was a concern. The problem was, Moura didn’t speak Spanish. But director José Padilha offered him the role after the two worked together on Brazilian cop drama Elite Squad. For Narcos, Brazilian actor Wagner Moura has been handed the task of portraying “El Patrón”. It was important not seeing him as ‘bad’ or ‘good’, because we all have that shit in ourselves Wagner MouraĪll this authenticity would be for nothing, though, without the right man playing Escobar. “Sure!”) For a US show it feels international, hurling viewers onto the very same streets where many of the things you see in the show actually happened. (“Could we actually make cocaine here?” says a production designer. The Guide has been invited to poke around a few of its sets, and the devil seems to be in the detail: rather than using a soundstage, a cocaine lab in season two has been built into a disused factory in Bogotá’s centre: bricks of “cocaine” stacked against every wall, heaps of the white stuff on tables – it’s usually milk powder, if you’re interested – and equipment bubbling away into labyrinthine webs of pipes and flasks. Now it’s back, and the hunt for Escobar is closing in.įilmed in the streets, buildings and rainforests of Colombia, with dialogue in English and Spanish, Narcos feels sleekly authentic: action scenes are captured vérité-style, expansive wide shots making full use of the grandeur of the country. Its first series was hugely popular and praised by critics last year Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos even said it was more popular than Game Of Thrones. At the same time it tells the also-true story of the Drug Enforcement Agency’s increasingly desperate and morally murky operation against him. Beginning with Escobar’s comparatively humble beginnings in racketeering, the series charts his meteoric rise all the way up to becoming the Colonel Sanders of blow. Narcos tells his story in swaggering fashion a striking, violent drama of guns, handlebar moustaches and awful 80s shirts. He’s almost certainly the most famous criminal who ever lived. No other famous lawbreakers – Al Capone, John Gotti, Bonnie and Clyde – come close to Escobar in sheer repute. Wild hippos still lurk near Hacienda Nápoles, Escobar’s ranch situated between his home town of Medellín and the country’s capital Bogotá, after they escaped from his personal zoo. Losses of $2.1bn a year, due to water damage or rats eating the bank notes, were written off as acceptable, because such numbers were a mere drop in the ocean. Rumours of immense stashes persist to this day. Making money faster than he could launder it, Escobar allegedly buried it in barrels. Escobar’s Medellín drug cartel was responsible for 80% of the global cocaine trade, raking in such colossal quantities of money that it spent $2,500 a month just on rubber bands to bunch banknotes together. He was so rich he offered to pay off Colombia’s national debt. At his peak, the Colombian drug lord is said to have been worth in the region of $30bn – around the same as Warren Buffett, adjusted for inflation. If fictional, Escobar’s story would seem absurd. But Narcos always had an ace up its sleeve. When Narcos debuted on Netflix last year, it could easily have been dismissed as just another one. For the past decade or so TV has been inundated with moody crime sagas. We’ve seen it all before: Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, Peaky Blinders, Sons Of Anarchy.
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